J? THE A Ji NEW YOKKlftß( . :: ...= 'ííl/II\' .. ... ,. /' ;.- -i--- ... :: ...:: rm . I'\\\\ *. o ::::s. '-, ' 0 0 . ... 0 . -" . "'.. ,,- THE TALI( OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment W E recently attended two events that lllay or lllay not be of interest to President Johnson, Henry F'owler, and \Villialll McChes- ney Martin for their relevance to the stability of the national econOlllY. On the first occasion, lllore than a thousand people in the business of thinking up and producing television cOllllllercials dressed up in theIr best black ties and ostrich-feather pa jalllas to go to the New York Hilton, where they cele- brated the Seventh Annual Allleri- can Television COIll III ercials Festival by watching seventy award-winning r:c \\ c-'l1 ''r ; ..1 ,-- \ ^,.- .' ./' " F1 cOllllllercials while eating a good din- ner. After dinner, there was dancing. A few days later, about eighty people- a lllixture of food editors and represent- atives of Standdrd Brands and J. \lVal- ter Tholllpson, all dressed with equal splendor, if lllore conservatively-gath- ered under cr} stal chandeliers in the Ballroolll Suite of the H..egency, where they perforllled simiLlr rites on behalf of a new instant pistclchio pudding and two new pie fillings that require no baking. "^ F"üOLISH consistenc}' is the hob- .fi. goblin of lIttle minds," Emer- son wrote, which only shows what a consumlllate radical he WaS. Just the other day, the United Republicans of California, a militant right-wing group originally forllled to help elect Barry Goldwater in 1964, held c:1 convention in Bakersfield and adopted a n ulllber of resolutions that demonstrated an altogether adlllirable consistency. The United Republicans are now on record as opposing Alllerican financIal support for the United Nations, Suprellle Court jurisdiction over reappOl tionlllen t, all llleasures to inn-od uce new forms of lnetropolitan or regional governlllent, all federal urbdn-renewal projects, and the so-called new lllath. The last itelll interests us particularly, because it shows the kind of willingness to go down the line for principle that one so rarely finds in lllodern life. \Ve look forward eager- ly to next year's convention, when, we hope, the United Republicans of Cali- fornia will join battle against such per- niciously creeping influences as Anton Dvorák's "New \Vorld" Symphony, Christian Dior's New Look of 1 947, and all nouvelle-vague lllovies, not to lllention such longer-standing threats to continental security as N ew York, New Haven, New Jersey, all of New Eng- land (with special elllphasis on New Halllpshire), New Mexico, New BrunswIck, and Nova Scotia. Eternal vigildnce is the price of Liberty. Quasars T HE problelll that the scientist en- counters in COllllllunicating with the laYlllan is never lllore lllanifest to u than at the annual lecture of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which takes place one evening in May on the Institution's prelllises, and which we attended this spring, as we have in past springs, at the kind invitation of Dr. Caryl P. Haskins, the Institution's president. The speaker this year was Dr. Allan R. Sandage, a thirty-nine- year-old staff memher of the Insti- tution's Mount WIlson and Palomar Observatories, in California, and his subject, "Radio Galaxies, <1uasars, and Cosmology," required one to know, ab initio, that radIo galaxies are aggre- gates of stars like our own Milky Way (known as the galaxy) but with the additional property that the gas in thelll produces natural radio noise, and that quasars rnay be galaxies that may be in the process of getting born or evolving. These fall into two categories-"radio quasars," which are sources of radio d " . " 1 . h energy, an qUIet quasars, w HC posSIbly are not. QUIet quasars, which are now being observed telescopically in a condition of explosion that prevailed eight or ten billion years ago, are far brighter than norlllal, or grown-up, galaxies. They were first discovered in June, 1965, by Dr. Sandage, who spends thirty nights a year in the ob- f;Þf?J. .,. .{' . if server's cage of the two-hundred-inch Hale telescope, on Mount Palolllar- the IllOSt powerful such instrulllent in the world. (Carnegie and Cal Tech scientists operate it jointly.) At the tillle of their apprehension, these antiquated novelties were described by Mr. \Val- ter Sullivan, the science editor of the T " " h . f zmcs, as enorlllOUS 0 Jects 0 un- matched brilliance that populate the entire universe... so nUlllerOl.lS that they should enable astronOlllers to de- terllline the nature of the universe." In 1960, radio quasars were dIscovered by Dr. Sandage and Dr. TOIll Matthews, a radio astronolller, and in 1963 Dr. Maarten Schmidt discovered the nature of quasars by revealing the great dis- tances between us and them. All this work WJ.S done in California. Quasars were introduced by Dr. S., in his talk- which was illustrated by fiery slides thereof, SCHlle in color and SCHlle in hlack-and-white-as "large-scale d stri- bution of matter in the universe which should tell. us when it all began, perhaps how it all began, certainly not why it all began." "\1 e had done SOllle quasar home- worK in the Carnegie's latest yearbook, in whIch Dr. Haskins has written: Vast new reaches of the universe have become observable In the dramatic find- ings of Allan Sandage.... Much prog- ress toward the optical identification of radio sources was also made by...